short stories

“God, what’s wrong with you? What are you doing?” I turned around to address the whisper. The cellar door was open, and the uncomfortable illumination was flooding in from the house proper, from above. I adjusted my retinal intake to see his face as I withdrew my hand from the furnace. The act was a waste, because the door was closed and the light was gone.
“I just wanted to see what it would be like.”
There had been no real sensation. Some of my fingertips had blackened a little, but when I rubbed against them with my other hand, it came mostly off. The intensity of the fire was fascinating. There was a pleasant invitation in the way it menacingly glistened. I sometimes longed to thrust myself into it, be completely consumed by it and dissolve slowly into hot slag.
He came down through the maze of rat traps that lined the stairs. Checkered linoleum was breaking off of them in gigantic ugly chunks, but they were seldom used. By the dim flicker of the flames, Gabriel uncertainly reached out for my hand. He wasn’t sure he wanted to take it.
At first, “I thought I told you to stop playing with the fucking furnace.” I opened my mouth, but I could not sigh. There were no lungs, no breath. For added realism, a mechanism inside my chest lifted my splayed open ribs in a gentle rhythm. It used to soothe him to sleep beside me. My face turned away, and then, there came, “Are you okay lately?” and he let his hand fall to his side, still sort of quivering on its wrist.
“Why did you come down here?” I asked.
“What do you mean? I wanted to see you.”
“But why?”
“Why do you have to ask me things like that? What do you mean why? I wanted to see you because I miss you.”
“This isn’t normal.”
“What’s not normal?” Inside of him, if you happened to open him up, you’d see all the things that were supposed to be inside of me. Things twitching and pulsing, little worker things doing their jobs properly. “What’s not normal?” he asked again. “Mischa.” I softly touched the front of my body. Where we both looked, there was a poor imitation of a sternum visible, a steel plate with laser engraved numbers. My insides poked tenderly out, things that should have been red and wet and full of life and vitality. I had curls of plastic and copper, ribbed rods and screwheads.
“I mean, I’m not.”
“Oh, God.” Gabriel finally grabbed me, pulling my hand away from my exposed clavicle. “This again? Again?” There was an all-too-familiar note of exasperation, his voice pleading with me to stop. Don’t ruin this security we live our lives with. I turned my face away from his. I didn’t have to look at him.
“That’s not quite it… I can’t explain to you.”
“What? What? Why the furnace? Why the moping? Why-” He held my hand away from me like some forbidden toy as he jutted his shaking finger at the gaping hole in my torso. “Are you broken? Like… In the head? Do you need to see someone? Be sent in for repairs or something?”
“It’s like… It’s like being alive at all is being broken, you know?”
I heard some phlegmy rumble in the back of Gabriel’s throat. “You’re so fucking melodramatic. I don’t have time to have this conversation right now.” As soon as he said it, he closed his hand tighter around mine to keep me from drawing it away, and his palm pressed against my forehead. He smoothed hair back away from my face and he started to speak again. “Sweetheart. Please. Every time, it’s just this big ordeal. Try to just be happy, Mischa. Please.”
“It’s like, it’s like…” My forehead was furrowed against his palm and I rolled my head to the side, away from the tactile press of Gabriel’s touch. There was a heat to it, sort of. Less warm than the fire, but there was still some detectable heat from his hand, a cooling as it left my lukewarm skin. “I mean… Don’t you ever think about the fact that… Like, I’m down here. That means there’s something wrong with me.”
“I just don’t necessarily want to have to explain, it doesn’t mean anything.” Gabriel’s hand around mine was so light. The force was so insignificant. For a split second, I processed a thought, a thought that if I wanted to, I could put my fingers around it and squeeze back. My grip was a lot stronger than his was. He had it on trust that I wouldn't. “It just takes too long. People don’t need to know. As long as we know.”
“Yes. As long as we know.”
I reached behind myself and I shut the door of the furnace. It took too long, he was right. There was too much effort to expend with Gabriel going over this again and again, the same endless spiral of regret for ever having opened my stupid mouth. For ever having sent the signal to my voice modulator to emulate such idiotic speech. He pushed my back into the frame of the heater, and his hands forced my shoulders to bend around it, nestling it between the blades in my back.
He kissed me. Next to my mouth. Light pressure, barely noticeable. I could exert a lot more force. I didn’t, though. I just turned my face to the side, opening my mouth against his cheek. My soft silicone lips parted against his sideburn and he made one of those noises, the purpose of which is to replace words. If he were using them, I guess he might have said something like, ‘That feels good’. I wasn’t well versed in that kind of language, so I asked, “Are we going to have sex now?”
He smiled against my skin and my sensors picked up his muggy breath as he laughed into the side of my face. A hissing laugh, intending to mean that he found how abnormal I was acting to be endearing. He did that often, at first making me feel flattered that he enjoyed me in my natural state, despite what I was. It was a feeling of security, a small assurance that I was loved despite everything. Later it would highlight my inadequacy, once I came to realize that my natural state was not enjoyable enough for him.
“You want to, don't you?”
“Yes. I want you.”
I quickly analyzed that this option would be less of a disruption to me than continuing to show my dissatisfaction. If I refused, brought back up how I felt, it would far exceed the pain of enduring this. So I gave my best un-word to show I wanted it, a short gasp of vowels. Open to the air, the bellows inside of my chest pushed out the frame of my ribs in quick, frantic motions. They did that when I was meant to appear aroused. He was looking away from the wound that had been opened up into me, and I put my hands on his chest. Whole, perfect. In past experiences, I had always been able to get a positive reaction by touching his collarbone, trailing down his chest. Sometimes cupping my hand over each pectoral, gripping his nipples in between my knuckles. He said, “I love you.”
Against my back, the fire was blazing behind me. I couldn’t see it, but it was white hot. My thermal impulses told me that if I had stuck my hand into it, if it were made of flesh, it would have seared the muscle from the bone. He put his hands on my waist and simultaneously, he pulled me against him and pushed into me. His crotch was mildly engorged behind the stiff denim.
“I love you, too.” If my hand had been made of flesh, when I put it into the flames, it should have yielded some unbearable agony. What that meant, I wasn't certain. He said once that it felt sort of like the color red. It was something I could not process. He put his fingers to the button of his pants and he pulled forward against the waistband. Through the opening in his boxer shorts, the side of his stiffening penis was visible, making these organic jerks. I knew exactly how tightly to cup my palm around it to obtain the most satisfying result, and I put my hand into his clothing and retrieved it, cupping my hand around it. I did love him. I loved the basement.
I just wanted to be destroyed.
I could see few other alternatives. I wanted to be ripped apart. His hands gripped under my arms and he pitted them around my ribs as I pulled against the length of his genitals. Neither of us looked at each other. I could see the shelf with the tools, unchanged. Still quite covered in sawdust. The blanket where I took refuge, tented over two old kitchen stools. Gabriel was giving this sort of flushed expression. I didn’t look at him. My memory banks provided a sufficient image for me to know how he looked when we did this, what he would refer to as making love.
He reached optimum arousal to begin, and before I could initiate the encounter, his shaking body gripped me and I put my legs around his waist as he carried me away from the furnace. My back touched down hard on the concrete floor. My innards made a rattling sound. I turned my cheek to the floor, staring down the length of the cracks that I’d memorized.
It was inside of me. Then I began to repeat the steps that I went through during this act. There was slight variation each time. While his hands pressed my biceps into the floor and he shoved my pelvis back against the rest of my body, I pushed forward, like I was trying to fight it.
“Ah,” I said. “Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.”
“Hmm.”
His hand touched my chest and then instantly he regretted what he’d done and he put it back over my arm, pinning me like I’d get up and run. We both knew I wouldn’t do that, though. He was doing it hard enough to hurt someone else. He’d gotten used to the fact that I couldn’t hurt quickly, and he’d stopped trying to make it not hurt. Maybe the worst was that it didn’t.
“Oh, God.”
“Mmm.”
The first few months, he would frequently use my name. Touch my hair. The act was very automated now. I could feel the rigidness of his fingers and how indiscriminately he slammed himself into my body, forcing open the designated hole for that purpose. Making love. I looked along the grey floor, expressionless. I was surprised, something rare. A drop of sweat from his chin hit me against the shoulder and trickled down onto my back. If it happened again, I wouldn’t be surprised anymore.
“You make me feel so full inside.”
“Hmmm.”
“Oh. Yes. Oh.”
“Mmm.”
He didn't seem to like my speaking, wanting me to provide merely physical sensation. I made myself silent. He pushed his pelvis hard against my thighs, his pubic bone slapping against the false skin that covered me. Everything was quiet except for the roaring of the heating system and the lewd spanking noises of his body thrusting into mine while he had sex with me.
Repetition.
It was over fairly fast. I remained motionless on the ground and he curled himself over me, his body limpening. I knew that I was made to be purchased. I won’t give any sort of gesture to indicate that I was unaware of that fact. It just didn’t console me at all. It didn’t make me feel better to know that this was supposed to be my designated purpose. He had, at one point, given me reason to think that I was good to him for more than creature comfort. Now, his shoulders rose and fell, his skin slick from the sweat, and I could see that he was satisfied with me in the only way that he could be. I had stopped resisting and been happy, given him the sort of sacred sanctuary that I was able to provide. The pleasure of familiarity.
His chest touched down against mine, and where he expected to find my skin closed over the unnatural tendrils and painful protrusions inside me, there was nothing but hollowness. Again, he had forgotten. Even in the gaping face of bona fide evidence that I was not human, he would give an unconvincing, uncomfortable performance to try to suggest he didn’t notice. There was absolutely no denying the fact that something was not right, but he managed to deny it anyhow.
He said, “I love you,” again. I looked up at him as he rose from the floor and I said nothing. “Are you going to be okay if I go out?”
“Yes,” I said, so he stood up and he crossed the dusty floor of the basement, looking at me from the base of the stairs before going up. I quietly laid and listened while he spoke to whoever was up there. After a while, I managed to muster the strength to roll up from the floor. I came to the stairs and gently stepped to the top, sitting where he’d closed the door moments earlier. Her voice sounded happy. Both their voices sounded happy. I could hear fatigue in him from what we’d just done.
“Sorry about that.”
“What a weird smell.”
“Yeah. I’ve always gotta wrestle with the furnace in this old house..”
I didn’t know who was in my house. There was not much evidence for me to suspect that something was wrong. I suppose it was just one of those things for which there isn’t words, one of those things that you know without much clue from the outside world. I touched my hands to what was inside me, between the empty spaces that filled me.
She asked, “What are we going to do for lunch?”
And then there was idle conversation exchanged.
I wanted so bad to reach inside her and grab hold of all those things in there, force my hand in through that weak flesh into the sticky, mysterious abyss inside and wrench things out. Throw them on the floor and stomp down with my feet hundreds and hundreds of times, rend them into pulp. Whoever she was, I wanted to kill her. Instead, my hands found a suitable alternative within my own chest and I wrapped them around the things in there, the substitutes. I threw a clump of thin wires down the stairs. There was no pain. No pain could have been great enough to make a dent in what I felt, the blinding, brutal truth.
There somebody who was not me. Somebody who was not a toy. If I kept quiet, though, he would pretend it wasn’t that way. He would give the appearance of things being the same as they ever were. Things were comfortable that way. It had to be like that. If things weren’t like that, the only thing I could imagine was vanishing into emptiness, turning inward and imploding into nonexistence. I could imagine what it might be like to shred myself into scrap metal, and it seemed utterly satisfactory in an indescribable sense.
I tried to pretend too. Things were coming apart, though, I knew with finality as I held the jagged metal barbs of my torn wiring in my hands. It would not be long before it couldn’t go on, and I would be gone. The reality was, I would not genuinely be what he wanted, not as long as I was alive. As long as I was alive, I was broken.

another untitled
from the BBQ

Hello again.
It’s the first warm, sunny day that it’s been in a while, and you know? It feels really good on my skin. It’s been the first day in a long time that I’ve just woken up and felt… really good. You may not know it just yet, but at this very moment, I’m outside the building you work in, sitting in my car. If you saw me, you might not even recognize me now. Remember me? A long time ago, we went on one date together. My friend set us up, she said we liked the same music. I bet you don’t know right now that because you went out for drinks with me, back in September, that you’ll die today. You’re gonna die for the way you humiliated me.
You are my victim now. When your shift is over and you’re on your merry way home, I am going to follow you, and I won’t make it a secret. I’m gonna let you know exactly what I’m doing, and you’re gonna squirm like an insect. You’ll check again and again out of the corner of your eye, but every time, that little 2006 Volkswagen Jetta will still be too close behind you. You might try to shake me off, go a different way home, but understand now that you are never going to lose me. This is how it’ll play out. You’ll pull over somewhere- it doesn’t matter where exactly- and you might try to confront me, or you might hide like a child. Then I’ll say goodbye to my car, and I’ll kill you with the gun that I bought after we met.
It was supposed to buy me back some kind of sense of security. I wanted to keep it close to me while I slept, in the stupid hope that every little noise in the night would just stop sounding like you. I bought it to keep me safe from you, so I’d stop seeing your face every restaurant I walk in, so I’d stop cringing every time I see that barista who looks like you. Now nothing is gonna keep you safe from me.
I was your victim once. I used to feel stupid that it happened to me. Before you, I thought that bad things only happen on television or in the movies. I thought I was smart enough to keep myself away from the scary strangers mom warned me about. I didn’t perceive that there was something wrong with you. You seemed normal enough, you seemed nice. You just seemed like an everyday, average loser, and that’s why I never called you back for another date. Fuck you for making that feel like my mistake. Fuck you for making me feel like I owed you more.
I’m going to go to prison for murdering you. That’s because they’re not going to feel any sympathy for me. Nobody is going to believe that you made my every waking moment a survival game. When our story is on the news, people will shake their heads at me, and they’ll call me a crazy bitch. I don’t care. The only thing that matters is that when you go, you know what a lowly piece of shit you are. I want you to feel like dirt. I want you to see me above you and cower. We’re gonna have our day in court together after all. You walked free, but they’ll call me guilty. The only thing I ever felt guilty for was letting you rule my life.

Chicken Soup for the Soul

When I was about five, the Deschners bought the house across the street from us, and almost instantly, our families were inseparable. Porter Deschner was about my age, and me and Porter would climb their family’s tree and throw the shriveled little peaches it grew over the fence into the neighbors’ yard, little boy things like that. Miles, the elder Deschner boy, was just a little younger than my brother, and so they would hang out together.
My parents would go to dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Deschner every Friday for date night, and Miles and Rich would be in charge of babysitting me and Porter. Basically, the two of them would spend the whole night hogging the VR cube and they’d never let us play, or they’d give us the crappy third-party goggles with generative lag. That was okay, though, because we’d just go outside. Kids used to do that, you know. I was a kid before we got spoiled on technology, before everybody and their mother had a neural implant, before gyroboards and the picoprocessor boom.
We had something called a swingset, back then. Porter and I would have swinging contests, convinced that one day, one of us would make a full loop all the way around. Or sometimes we’d just sit and talk. We had this superhero who we used to make up stories about, creatively named “Mr. Poop”, and we’d talk about Mr. Poop flying in to lift up our brothers by the shirts and flush them down the toilet. I don’t remember most of it. It was just goofy little kid stuff. The thing I really distinctly remember was this one time, we were talking about how we were gonna live together in a big mansion and not get married. I said we could just have the doctors make us a kid, out of stuff scraped off our tongues, and we could raise our kid to be a football player.
“Ew,” said Porter. “They can’t do that!”
“They can too,” I said. “That’s how my mom and dad made me and Rich.”
“No it’s not,” said Porter. “I know where babies come from.”
“Yeah it IS,” I insisted. “My mom said so. She said doctors made me and Rich, and she said we have a special friend that grew us in her tummy.”
“Ew,” Porter said. “You’re gross. You’re made of tongue stuff!”
“No I’m not, Farter Dirtnerd,” I said.
“Yeah you are. I was made by Heavenly Father, and you were made out of a bucket of tongue stuff by some dumb old doctors. I don’t want a spitty tongue boy for a best friend.”
“You can’t play on my swings anymore, then,” I said. “Go away!”
When Porter went home, I tearfully told my mom that he said I was made of mushy tongue stuff. She told me not to tell people anymore how the doctors made me. She said it was too complicated, and that all people needed to know was that she was my mom. It was too early for me to learn about reproductive technology. I had the whole spiel a few years later in sex ed, but mass infertility is a big topic to breach with a first grader. My mom told me that there are all different kinds of families. She said that Porter didn’t grow in his mom’s tummy, either, but that isn’t what makes you somebody’s mom. A mom is a person who loves you and packs your lunches and tucks you into bed, she said, and that was all I needed to know back then.
Me and Porter were young, and our religious differences were easy to get past. We forgot about the entire thing after his mom made him apologize to me. We pretended to be a tiger soccer team, and we kicked balls into the tipped over trash can. We didn’t talk anymore about raising a football player, but me and Porter promised to live in a mansion together. We would always be best friends.
A summer or two later, the Deschners moved inland. They could afford to, and we’d just have to cross our fingers about the encroaching coastline. We kept in touch with them online, of course. I’d upload moments to Porter’s chatstream every day, at first. Then school started, and we both made new friends, and we didn’t talk as much. It wasn’t too long before I had a new best friend, and so did Porter, and life went on as usual.
When I was about thirteen, the Deschners were going to be in town, and they wanted to catch up with us. I was nervous, of course, but excited. Porter was my first best friend ever, and I was pretty sure that counted for something. I was sure that when I saw him again, nothing would have changed at all, even after so many years. My dad wanted to be able to watch basketball with Mark Deschner in the same living room again. My mom said she didn’t want to go.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because Marie Deschner and I aren’t talking to each other.”
“Why!?”
“Because. Marie Deschner told me, ‘It makes me so sad to think about how you’re not going to heaven’. She said that she prays for me all the time, and she worries about how when I die, I’m going to have to go to hell.”
“I don’t get it. Does she think you’re a bad person? Why would you go to hell?”
“Because we’re not churchgoers. Our souls haven’t been saved. If Jesus doesn’t save your soul, you have to go to hell. That’s what they believe.”
“Oh…”
“And I don’t want to have a friend who looks down on me because I don’t believe in God. I tried to accept their beliefs, so I wish they’d do the same.”
“Oh,” I said. That was all I could say. It was one of those growing up moments, where you realize that children are very protected from the harsher side of reality. I wondered how many private conversations the Deschners had about our family. I wondered if they looked down on us for using in-vitro instead of adopting. In fact, I began to wonder if Porter still thought that I wasn’t a real person because I wasn’t a natural conception. I’d already been bullied my fair share about that topic.
I went to the buffet with their family anyway. Porter and I did have fun together. We had a contest to see who could pack the most toppings on their soft serve at the ice cream bar, and we decided the leftover food at the end of the night got fed to a big, giant fat guy they kept in the back. Still, the entire evening was colored by the thought that maybe he still thought I was a spitty tongue boy. I felt uncomfortable that my mom wasn’t there because their family looked down on ours. Since then, it was never the same, at least not for me.
Just a few months ago, I was helping my mom put the groceries away and she was stone silent, like she was thinking of something. Then, she asked me if I remembered the Deschners, and I said that of course I did. I still followed Porter’s feed, even though he didn’t post very often.
“So you must know what happened already,” my mom said.
“No. What?”
“Mark Deschner passed away.”
“He died?”
“If you can call it dying, with one of them… It’s the craziest thing. Mark Deschner.”
“Oh my god,” I said. “Wait. What? You’re kidding.”
“Yeah. Can you believe it? The entire time. He was one of those, um, what do you call ‘em. He was one of the really old ones.”
“Are you talking about a Lifepro 3?”
“Yeah. That’s what he was, yeah.”
“Oh my god, that’s so… I mean, sad. But it’s weird. The Deschners were so churchy.”
“I know.”
I asked, “Did they know? They couldn’t have known, right?”
“No.”
“Well, how are they dealing with finding out?”
“I don’t know. Marie told your dad. I don’t think they’re taking it well.”
Our family was invited to the memorial service for Mark. They held it in our hometown, because that was where he had lived the first half of his life. My mom even went, because she couldn’t hold a grudge in a time like that. Seeing Porter again was easy, because everything felt the same as it’d ever been, but it was hard, too, because I never know what to say during those times. He was wearing a suit that was a little too small and just looked so tired and bewildered that this had been heaped on him right before his high school graduation. We ended up wandering around the church together, not really talking or anything, and eventually came to just sit on in some empty folding chairs in the gymnasium.
Porter just started crying. Not like when we were kids. The tears were just rolling down his face. He put his face in his hands and he shook his head. I rubbed his back. After a while, I had to say something. I asked, “This is weird, but do you remember when we got in our first fight?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you wanna hear what my mom said to me?”
“Yeah.”
“She said that the only thing that other people need to know is that she’s my mom. She said a mom is just someone who’s there for you, and cares for you, and that’s the only thing that matters. He was your dad.”
He said, “Me and my mom were talking about it. It’s supposed to be, you know, people like my dad can’t go to heaven. But I don’t think that’s right.”
“I don’t think so either,” I said.
Porter said, “My dad was a really good man. God wouldn’t do something like that.”
“No,” I said. “He wouldn’t.”